


lottery

by icemakestars



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Gen, Suicide, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:01:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29300823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icemakestars/pseuds/icemakestars
Summary: Osten thought that life was a lottery, that everything was down to chance. So he takes matters into his own hands.





	lottery

**Author's Note:**

> Another short piece written for university a few years back. Apparently I am incapable of happiness. Figures.

Life was a lottery, and yet Osten had never taken that quite as literally as he did in that moment. The lottery ticket was crumpled, and the edges bit into his palm, a painful reminder of his own weaknesses. It was naïve to believe that all of his problems could be solved by a salmon piece of print, but it was all he had, his final hope; everything else was gone, obsolete.

Money would not bring his son back or save his marriage or save his home from under him. It would not reconnect him with his parents or keep his lost job. And yet, he clutched tighter onto it, the ticket becoming his lifeline, grounding him, giving him purpose. It was still not enough though, and he knew that, felt the truth of it wrap around his stomach and constrict.

Osten felt sick, but even when he doubled over and coughed onto the cracked pavement, he was not concerned about bringing anything up. Vomiting would require substance in the stomach, and he could not name the last meal that passed his lips. People passed, eyeing him but not offering their help. It was midmorning, and they were no doubt working on the assumption that he was wasted in whatever way he chose to poison himself. He did not blame them for their scepticism, knew that he would feel the same if presented with a young, grimy looking man who was throwing up before noon. Even that assumption which people had about him was better than his reality, and he fell onto his front door with enough force to bruise, and yet he felt nothing.

His apartment was cold, and dark, with the TV flickering a channel he did not recognise in the corner. Osten threw his keys on the table along with his jacket, kicked off his shoes as he moved into the kitchen and opened his cupboard, knowing that they were empty but hoping that he was wrong anyway. He wasn’t. The handle slips from his hand, and they slam shut. He ignores them, moving to sit on his floor, back resting on the cluttered couch.

For years he had worked the same factory job, and it was hard and unrewarding, but it was familiar, and Osten knew how to do it well. But humans were commodities, and once they had ran their course they were easily dispensable, replaceable. The reality was that the years it had took him to perfect his craft were pointless; a machine could give the same results with no payment or training. No breaks. It stung, how worthless he was, but still the truth of it seeped into bones, infecting him, and it was consuming. He could think of nothing else as he sat there, with time passing him by. There was an unspoken confidence, an air of knowledge that teased arrogance, which Osten always emitted, but for him, every day was Halloween; he was so used to dressing up his persona, masking is true feelings, that maybe he would not recognise himself anymore. Osten did not know if he would want to, not after everything that had happened.

Meredith knew better, saw through his confident façade, and that’s why she left him; that’s why everyone left him. Osten knew that he had never deserved her, with as beautiful and selfless as she was, but she needed out, an escape. She needed assurance of a stable future, and he could not give her that, had never given her that. He did not blame her for leaving; he would leave himself too, if he could.

At this, his head snaps up. There are cans next to him, and he cracks one open, glugging over half of its content before wiping his mouth with a sigh. He could leave himself of course, in the crudest sense, if he was strong enough to do so. But strength was something lost to him, and the proof was in how his life was fraying at the seams. It would not be long before it tore apart completely, and he with it.

He had to take action before that happened, take his life into his own hands. Or maybe just take his life. Osten finishes off the can, starts the next one. They go down easy on an empty stomach, and he feels their affects quicker than usual, his body desperate for sustenance that he simply could not provide. With the second can already crumpled by his side, Osten pushes himself up and searches his house for the only thing that his grandfather had left him. The only thing of any use, anyway; memories and photographs were not going to put food on his table, or money in his bank account.

A handgun was not something that could be lost easily, and Osten found it where he knew would, behind the loose tile in the bathroom. It felt lighter than he remembered, slicker. Despite the age of the object it held no rust, or signs of deterioration, just an overwhelming sense of menace.

Osten clutched the barrel to his chest, the calloused pads of his fingertips brushing tentatively over the trigger for just a moment. He dragged his feet back into the living room, resumed his slouching position on the floor, and placed the gun in front of him. His head fell into his hands, body doubled over, and when he sits up a primal yell is torn from deep within his chest.

The tears have already saturated the colour on his shirt before he feels them on his cheeks, and it’s the numbness that he cannot comprehend; he was a stain in his body, barely there, and he knew that he did not deserve anymore than this. This was his fate, and he succumbed to it with grace.

Time passed quickly, the gun a formidable opponent in the staring content that Osten was having with it. He lost the game as he had everything else, and he flung his head back, eyes glancing over the windows. Grotty curtains hung limp by their sides, stiff with dust, but they were hardly visible in the twilight that had descended. A whole day had passed, and yet Osten did not feel any aches. Did not feel anything.

And maybe that was his problem, why Meredith had really left; she could find better, someone more in touch with their emotions, and she would thrive with them. But Osten was stoic, found it difficult to speak to people, and that had cost him his job. Cost him everything.

The Television still flickered, and now it was his only source of light. A gameshow that he did not recognise showed excited bystanders being fed capitalist lies by an overexuberant host who would not remember their names once the camera shut off. Osten scoffed at them, at their attention grabbing, and how they were no better than children. Worse, they were no better than him.

A sliver of pink caught his eye, and he grabbed for it, his chest lungs inflated with disappointment when he realised that it was just the lottery ticket that he had picked up that morning. The numbers were the same as always, chosen months ago by Meredith. They meant nothing to him, though, were just birthdays of her sisters, or the amount of months that they had been together. It was laughable, how much he loved her. How much of himself he had given, even if she could not see it, or understand how difficult it was to lay himself bare, vulnerable.

Osten fell forward, hands clutched into his mousy brown hair until the pain in his head rivalled the one in his chest, blossoming outwards in broken, angry shards. The tears were replaced by sobs, the mutterings with screams, and he rocked with the force of them, his body unable to contain an agony this strong, or this concentrated.

In a moment of renewed clarity, Osten saw that there was only one solution fit for him. Meredith deserved better. His parents deserved better. The world deserved better. He was nothing, insignificant to the undulations that carried the Earth, and there was a sin in living like this, so dependant on others, and yet bringing them nothing but misery. But maybe the greatest sin of all was denying himself the release that he so deeply craved, and the freedom from his selfishness that his loved ones no doubt needed, deserved.

“Enough.” His voice was coarse, foreign even to himself.

And it was enough, finally. His actions had meaning, he found a purpose, and it was almost freeing, the relief of knowing that in death he had found a significance lost to him in life.

When he picked up the gun, his hands did not shake, and his grip was firm. Certain. The barrel tasted musty, and he gagged around it. It was real to him then, but he had no regrets; there was nobody to mourn his absence in life, so Osten saw no reason for that to change in death.

Sweat pooled across his forehead, along his neck, and his eyes were screwed tight shut. He had no desire for seeing this world for another second. Osten took one last, long breath, and then his finger snapped, the gun trembling with the force of it, and the aftershock of the fire. In seconds, Osten’s apartment had gone from grey, to red, and he lay in a pool of his own discontent. Dead.

The television continued to play, now too loud in the deafening silence that lay in the wake of the gunshot. Lottery numbers, as per the norm for a Saturday.

  1. _19\. 23. 29. 32. 48. 02._



The pink, crumbled ticket remained by Osten’s hand, unaware of its own irony.

Osten was discovered after an hour, but by then it was too late; his blood had seeped into the paper, marring the ink until it was unrecognisable, falling apart in its over saturation.

Death had treated Osten like life had; poorly, and unfairly, his luck changing for the better just to succumb to a wave of dire circumstance. Death was not freeing, it was condemning, and he was lost to it, to the true sin that he had committed; not pausing, not realising that luck can change, would change, had he just done the impossible. If he had just given life a chance.


End file.
